Trolls triumphant! Morton Arboretum set an attendance record in 2018, DuSable was up 31 percent during a generally down year for Chicago's museums

Six colossal wooden trolls are making their home in the Morton Arboretum's 1,700 acres. They were built by Danish artist Thomas Dambo and his team using hundreds of pieces of reclaimed wood, battered boards, fallen trees and branches.

A posse of grand-scale wooden troll sculptures carried Morton Arboretum to the highest attendance in its 97-year history during 2018, as 1.276 million people visited the west suburban nature park.

The news was not so rosy, however, on the Museum Campus, where all the institutions suffered audience declines versus 2017, as did the major Chicago-area nature parks that aren’t named Morton: Brookfield Zoo, Lincoln Park Zoo and Chicago Botanic Garden.

All together, the 17 museums and parks the Tribune tracked this year, including all of the most popular ones, saw a drop in attendance of almost 6 percent from the year before, to 16.508 million in total. For perspective, that’s more than double the number of people the city’s five major professional sports franchises lured out of their chairs, a combined 6.897 million to Cubs, White Sox, Bulls, Blackhawks and Bears home games in their most recently completed seasons.

“We’re understanding that people really need respite,” said Sue Wagner, Morton’s vice president of education and information. “There’s a lot of buzz, distraction, noise. By coming to the arboretum or a garden people can have a sense of peace and feel replenished.”

It didn’t hurt, either, that “Troll Hunt,” the collection of giant recycled-wood figures crafted by latter-day Danish hippie Thomas Dambo and secreted on the grounds, turned out to be Chicago’s only blockbuster museum exhibition of 2018.

Bold, inventive and utterly delightful, “Troll Hunt,” which will remain up through 2019, helped Morton tally its most popular month in history. The 1,700-acre hiking, biking and slow-driving destination notched 164,000 people in July, “Troll Hunt’s” first full month, beating the previous high of 152,000 set in Oct. 2011, during the typical Morton prime-time of foliage season.

Another driver of the record attendance, a 15.6 percent gain over 2017, was the artful holiday lights display “Illumination,” which in its sixth year drew a record 183,000 people in November and December.

Anthony Souffle / Chicago Tribune

The morning sun shines on the DuSable Museum of African American History in Washington Park in 2015. The museum reported a 31 percent jump in visitors in 2018.

The morning sun shines on the DuSable Museum of African American History in Washington Park in 2015. The museum reported a 31 percent jump in visitors in 2018. (Anthony Souffle / Chicago Tribune)

Another very big audience jump in 2018 came at the DuSable Museum of African American History, up 31 percent to 146,000. The South Side museum credited the opening of five new exhibits during 2018, along with the Hamilton Institute for Research and Civic Involvement.

The Art Institute was up very slightly to 1.62 million visitors. The Illinois Holocaust Museum saw a 3.5 percent rise to 120,000 people. And Newberry Library, which extensively remodeled its first floor in hopes of presenting a friendlier public face, saw its bet pay off: Visitorship nearly doubled, to almost 37,000.

Some caveats: These figures are all self-reported and were compiled this year by asking the institutions directly. In a typical year, most of them will be put together for the institutions on public land by the Museums in the Parks consortium and then released publicly. MIP did not do that this year as some member institutions pushed back against the usefulness of keeping score by yearly head count.

To be sure, attendance at the attractions always fluctuates based on weather, the presence or absence of popular special exhibitions, even the refusal of the sun to deliver the region eclipse totality more than once a century or so.

But taking an annual snapshot is a good way to monitor trends over time. And for all the institutions have to say about other measures of civic engagement, you can bet they look closely at total audience.

Examples of what the absence of a blockbuster can mean to a year’s attendance figures came at the Museum of Contemporary Art and Adler Planetarium. Attendance at MCA fell off 25 percent in 2018, to 278,000, from the record-setting 2017 featuring the Takashi Murakami exhibition; staffers were encouraged, however, that 278,000 is about a 12 percent boost over the more typical attendance in 2016.

And the Adler dropped 17.3 percent to 526,000 in 2018, but 2017’s numbers were goosed by the presence of peak solar eclipse viewing in Illinois.

Elsewhere on the museum campus, Field Museum suffered the greatest decline, falling 15.3 percent to 1.525 million visitors during its 125th anniversary year. The Field was under repair for large chunks of the year, recasting its central hall and not getting star T. rex skeleton Sue back on display until December.